Dear Julián:

We are two young Italian families who moved to England (to the Liverpool area) because of work. We arrived in a land we didn't know, and we started new jobs, and we found ourselves often clashing with a totally foreign culture. This phenomenon ended up generating constant hostility and persistent complaining. The result was isolation, and the tendency to avoid problems, or the people who might create them. This detachment from reality–which led us to be alienated spectators rather than the protagonists of our lives–almost reached a point of no return. After a few months, we met and the community grew from five to ten people. We were greatly struck by this sign of an unexpected tenderness toward us. Faced with a given reality, we started abandoning ourselves to Him. If He had called us to live in this precise place and time, we had to involve our whole humanity in this reality. For this reason, the new home and town in which we live now are not just a home, and a town, but our home and our town. We opened our eyes and discovered this place to be far more beautiful than we thought. Following Giovanna's initiative, we learned a few–very beautiful–traditional songs. Later, we were given another unexpected sign: we discovered that the parish that houses the relics of the Blessed Domenico Barberi was just a few miles from us. He was an Italian priest who lived a simple and yet extraordinary life, marked by unyielding faith and unrelenting patience, and above all by infinite love for the British people. Domenico worked diligently for the Church's unity–which he didn't view as an abstract or ideological concept. We are certainly far from Blessed Domenico's kind of life and understanding; yet, in our small way, we too have seen the birth of a surprising unity, which goes beyond our laziness and the miles that separate us, or the languages and traditions we come from. This unity, which is not our own, changes us and opens up our hearts. Because of it, we began charitable work alongside an English family, asking that every moment and every face that this land gives us can really become the occasion for a dialogue with God.

Luca, Margherita, Luca, Giovanna, Liverpool (Great Britain)